User blog:Hdgames/The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D Review
The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D Review =How Did Aliens Get Into The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask?= Following up on the success of The Ocarina of Time remake for 3DS, The Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask 3D is coming out soon alongside the launch of Nintendo's next handheld iteration, the New 3DS. But while Shigeru Miyamoto make take the spotlight as the original creator of the Zelda franchise, the man who's been guiding it as director and producer since the release of the original Ocarina of Time is Eiji Aonuma. While he's not ready to talk about the highly anticipated Wii U chapter in the Zelda franchise, we went on a nostalgia-filled trip through the original Majora's Mask's development in this recent interview. What was the inspiration behind the cow-mutilating aliens? What Western games does Aonuma draw inspiration from? And why doesn't this remake have Amiibo support? Find out below! GameSpot: Thematically, the game is very different than previous Zelda games and even compared to the games that came after. What drove the decision to make this more of an adventure-puzzle game, and why do you think the series hasn't tried this kind of experimental form again? Eiji Aonuma: I guess one way to address that is, when you're thinking about time as an element of gameplay, we really did all that we set out to do here. And to a certain extent that's true with masks as well. Because we so fully realized our ideas with how to use those as themes in the game, we felt like we were done with it and were ready to move on to new ideas afterwards. We didn't feel the need to use those exact ideas in other games beyond that. But it's interesting for me to come back to it now because in this remake, we got the opportunity to revisit those same game ideas, but also to make some interesting improvements and changes elsewhere. With the way that you progress through this game as opposed to more traditional Zelda games, especially with all the time manipulation, is that something that we might see again sometime in the future? One particular game element, being able to slow down the passage of time, I think that's something that we may be able to revisit in the future. But if we were to do so, it would have to to be implemented in a different way. It would have to be different to be meaningful. So that's something you might see again in the future. Late last year we talked with Koji Kondo, the Majora's Mask's musical composer. He mentioned that he found inspiration in Chinese opera for several of the game's aural themes. What was your inspiration and direction for Majora's Mask? Is that true? I'd never heard that about Mr. Kondo's inspiration! But I know that in coming up with the music for Ocarina of Time, there were a lot of melodies where we were going for a sort-of magical feel. And then moving on to Majora's Mask, we had the masks as the theme, so we thought it would be interesting to switch between different genres in this game. We started to think about how we could mash those up. For example, we thought about pairing the Zora people in the game with Bossa Nova. And there was certainly a moment in the beginning where everyone in development wondered if we could really do that. We were unsure whether or not it would work. I hope I didn't cause too much trouble for they guys working on the game, but I think that they came up with some amazing compositions and also some really interesting variations on the music that appeared in Ocarina as well. Playing through the game a again for this version, some of the easter eggs that I remember from before have been changed. There's no longer a dolphin the Astral Observatory, but there is a R.O.B. in the Curiosity shop. Are there any other new additions like that? Because it's a remake, there were a couple things we were able to do now that we had a higher resolution to work with. So you will find some new objects that were not in the original N64 version. There's a lot of stuff like that all through the game. Little playful touches here and there. I hope people have fun looking for those. One specific Easter Egg people have discussed before is a set of four masks that seem to represent Star Fox characters. In the N64 version they were set up in a fixed order on the second row: a fox, a rabbit, a bunny, a frog. Was that intentional? You know, as it turns out, I think the ordering of those masks in the N64 version might've been entirely coincidence! As we progressed through game's development, they just lined up that way. Or, I guess the other possibility, is someone did it on purpose, but they just didn't tell me about it! There are lots of refinements to the 3DS version of the game, but in a broad sense it's very true to the original. But were there any masks or elements that came up during the original development when this was coming to the Nintendo Disc Drive system that you ultimately weren't able to incorporate? Originally, we were thinking of doing a re-arranged dungeon version of Ocarina of Time for the Disc drive. But I realized that the person who would have to do the arrangement of the flipped dungeons, and would have to do all the tuning for that, was going to have to be me. But I really didn't want to go back into the dungeons that we had just worked so hard to lay out, and then have to rearrange them and tune them in that way. That's when we moved toward the proposal of doing Majora's Mask instead. Maybe it's not entirely, 100% accurate to say that Majora's Mask itself was going to be a disc drive game, but rather that there was this re-arranged Ocarina idea for disc drive that got scrapped and we ultimately landed on Majora's Mask. As for mask's that weren't implemented or other gameplay ideas that we didn't end up using, to be perfectly honest, there probably were lots of those. But because it was 14 years ago, I'm having a hard time thinking of an example. So the goal was to make this a more frightening, supernatural experience than the other Zelda games? There were some opportunities to do rather dark and scary things in Ocarina as well. You know you had the "seven years later" version of the world that Ganon had wrecked. But in the case of Termina, we're really doing something a little bit different. We're changing the entire games world around this concept. And what we were going for here was trying to age-up the demographic of Zelda a little bit. We were thinking about a world that might be particularly appealing to adults who would play this game. Category:Blog posts Category:Blog posts